Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama moved to
quell growing dissent among Democratic lawmakers over the
troubled rollout of his signature health-care law, summoning
senators facing re-election for a two-hour White House meeting.

Fifteen Senate Democrats whose terms are up in 2014, along
with Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, who heads the party’s
Senate campaign arm, aired complaints about the flawed federal
website for enrolling in an insurance plan and several pressed
to postpone the Affordable Care Act’s deadline to obtain
coverage, according to several lawmakers present.

“The dysfunction and delays are unacceptable,” Merkley
said in a statement afterward. “For each day of delay, the
window for applications should be extended by a day.”

Since opening Oct. 1, the federal website serving 36 states
has been plagued by delays, error messages and hang-ups that
prevented customers from completing applications. As a result,
the Obama administration has lowered expectations for initial
enrollment. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius told a Senate panel yesterday those numbers will be
released next week.

In addition, Republicans are accusing Obama of misleading
the public as hundreds of thousands of individual health
insurance plans are being canceled, contradicting his repeated
pledge that people who like their coverage would be able to keep
it when the law took effect.

Delay Rebuffed

The Obama administration has rebuffed calls to extend the
deadline for enrollment.

“For millions of Americans delay is not an option,”
Sebelius told the Senate Finance Committee, her second
appearance before a congressional panel in a week.

Obama left the meeting with the senators for a trip to
Dallas, the U.S. city with the most uninsured residents eligible
to participate in the federal marketplace -- 670,000 in 2011 --
according to data from the Census Bureau and the White House. He
was there to rally volunteers helping to sign up uninsured
Texans who’ve been stymied by the faulty website.

“Nothing is going to stop us from getting this done,
because we’re on the right side of history,” Obama told the
interfaith group at Temple Emanu-El.

Jeffrey Zients, who Obama drafted to oversee repairs to the
federal healthcare.gov website and was in the meeting with the
Democratic senators, has promised to have the job finished by
the end of the month.

Seeking More

Some of the Democratic lawmakers at the White House
session, whose re-election chances are vulnerable to any voter
backlash against the 2010 law known as Obamacare, said that
wasn’t enough.

“The roll-out of healthcare.gov has not been smooth -- to
say the least,” Senator Mark Udall of Colorado said in an e-mailed statement after the meeting. “Consumers should have the
time they need to shop for a plan and enroll after the
widespread problems with the website are fixed.”

Insurer Humana Inc. is anticipating some concession by the
Obama administration, including a possible extension of the
open-enrollment period beyond March, said James Murray, chief
operating officer for the Louisville, Kentucky-based company.

“There’s a problem with the enrollment, and because of
that, the likely enrollment that we’ll receive will be changed
from what we thought,” Murray told investors yesterday on an
earnings conference call. “We’re waiting for guidance from the
government.”

Enrollment Targets

The administration had a target of 800,000 Obamacare sign-ups for the first two months and the Congressional Budget Office
has projected that 7 million people would enroll through 2014.
Americans have until Dec. 15 to enroll in coverage that would
start Jan. 1. Those who don’t find health insurance by March 31
may have to pay a fine of as much as 1 percent of their income.

Sebelius said yesterday the initial enrollment from October
will be “very low,’” though she declined to provide specific
figures.

“Until the site is improved and we really open up the
doors wide to more people, we’re going to have a struggle to get
significant numbers of people signed up,” she said.

In Dallas, where he also spoke at two fundraisers for the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Obama sought to turn
the tables on Republican critics. Texas Governor Rick Perry is
among the Republican state executives who have refused to set up
a state insurance exchange and turned down an expansion of the
federal Medicaid program that’s a provision in the law.

‘Common Sense’

“Ideology has taken precedence over common sense and
helping people,” Obama said at the first fundraiser, held at
the home of Dallas lawyer Peter Kraus. The president referred to
Perry’s stance as “bullheadedness” and said that expanding
Medicaid in the Lone Star state would help 1 million people
there find insurance.

About one in four Texans were uninsured in 2012 compared
with 16.9 percent of the U.S. population, according to the
Census Bureau. The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area had an
uninsured rate of 24.3 percent.